No, because the VPE was doing it out of ego and because he thought the problem was easy, not out of any practicality.

No amount of argument was enough.

This was his only job, he was at the company for 10 years, was a schoolfriend of the CTO and suddenly got promoted to VPE when the company grew over 50 devs. So total lack of experience.

The funny thing is we didn't even need to prototype: another team had already integrated the same third-party in their own project, so there was ZERO doubts, we had an in-house expert.